F5 Dave
27th July 2006, 11:47
A friend interested in vocalising opinions for the purposes of training etc asked me the question about the limit of traction & how to recognise it & teach it. He has a far better knowledge of this, but is always listening.
I am no expert (& am not pretending to be) but I figured if I wrote this spiel I might as well cut & paste it here as well.
Limit of traction
I used to think about this. On my ride to work when I lived in Karori I went the same way. I rode at what I thought was a safe & brisk pace. I came down this incline to meet up with the main road. It was coarse chip, lots of traction, but downhill & off camber to meet the main road which was also downhill. As I became familiar I used to brake fairly heavily to that intersection.
I then began to ask myself, what if I needed to stop faster than I was already braking? What if someone pulled out of a driveway or kid ran across the road? Could I brake harder? So I tried.
Front end lose, tyre went sideways, let off the brake, banged foot on ground & re braked. Made it, but wouldn’t want to ask to get off that a 2nd time. Learnt that what I had felt was the limit was actually the limit (bearing in mind I had a calibrated sense from practising braking). What I learnt was actually I was travelling too fast if something out of the norm occurred.
I later tried the same thing downhill (Raroa rd) in the wet. Again the good lord smiled on me again & I didn’t ditch it. Again I was travelling at a safe speed on a wet road – as long as I didn’t need to brake to avoid someone else turning across my path or stopped around a blind corner with someone coming he other way. Learn the feeling of traction from braking practise & believe in it. Ask yourself the question ‘What would happen if? Can you do anything about it?’
I have ridden with people that would come acroppa if, say up the Pie-cock hill they encountered a broken down car that had stopped around a tight corner.
‘Have to be able to stop within the visible distance’ means more than most people think.
Early on I had experience racing that I was on the limit & I knew I was ‘cause I would get slides & occasionally fall off in certain corners - you could feel it.
But someone would come sailing past me much faster in complete control. How did they do it? Better tyres? Better bike? Well in some cases yes.
But one of the main things is that you need a stable platform to enter into a corner. The traction you use up braking, then letting off the brake & turning in while the front end is still trying to work out if it is compressing or rebounding uses that front tyre to the limit. If it doesn’t have those confused demands then it has more traction to spare.
Trying to keep up with a mate is for many like a panic situation where you don’t have the time to think about your riding, you just end up arriving in corners faster than you want so you compensate with more braking, thus a less stable platform.
Technology:
Better bikes, suspension & obviously tyres help. But you only have to go on a group ride to see someone on a flash bike crash it. Kiwibiker always has stories of people binning bikes. They aren’t a group of crashers more than any other group, they are just a large amount of people on bikes.
So I don’t know that anything has actually changed with our better bikes. That doesn’t make sense, they are much safer performing. Maybe what has changed is it has just increased the speeds we have accidents at?
But gravel on the road while banked over will slide a modern tyre out as quickly as a 20yr old one. Can you change line at a faster pace
I would say that braking practise on all surfaces teaches you a lot of transferable skills when it comes to sensing traction limits.
I am no expert (& am not pretending to be) but I figured if I wrote this spiel I might as well cut & paste it here as well.
Limit of traction
I used to think about this. On my ride to work when I lived in Karori I went the same way. I rode at what I thought was a safe & brisk pace. I came down this incline to meet up with the main road. It was coarse chip, lots of traction, but downhill & off camber to meet the main road which was also downhill. As I became familiar I used to brake fairly heavily to that intersection.
I then began to ask myself, what if I needed to stop faster than I was already braking? What if someone pulled out of a driveway or kid ran across the road? Could I brake harder? So I tried.
Front end lose, tyre went sideways, let off the brake, banged foot on ground & re braked. Made it, but wouldn’t want to ask to get off that a 2nd time. Learnt that what I had felt was the limit was actually the limit (bearing in mind I had a calibrated sense from practising braking). What I learnt was actually I was travelling too fast if something out of the norm occurred.
I later tried the same thing downhill (Raroa rd) in the wet. Again the good lord smiled on me again & I didn’t ditch it. Again I was travelling at a safe speed on a wet road – as long as I didn’t need to brake to avoid someone else turning across my path or stopped around a blind corner with someone coming he other way. Learn the feeling of traction from braking practise & believe in it. Ask yourself the question ‘What would happen if? Can you do anything about it?’
I have ridden with people that would come acroppa if, say up the Pie-cock hill they encountered a broken down car that had stopped around a tight corner.
‘Have to be able to stop within the visible distance’ means more than most people think.
Early on I had experience racing that I was on the limit & I knew I was ‘cause I would get slides & occasionally fall off in certain corners - you could feel it.
But someone would come sailing past me much faster in complete control. How did they do it? Better tyres? Better bike? Well in some cases yes.
But one of the main things is that you need a stable platform to enter into a corner. The traction you use up braking, then letting off the brake & turning in while the front end is still trying to work out if it is compressing or rebounding uses that front tyre to the limit. If it doesn’t have those confused demands then it has more traction to spare.
Trying to keep up with a mate is for many like a panic situation where you don’t have the time to think about your riding, you just end up arriving in corners faster than you want so you compensate with more braking, thus a less stable platform.
Technology:
Better bikes, suspension & obviously tyres help. But you only have to go on a group ride to see someone on a flash bike crash it. Kiwibiker always has stories of people binning bikes. They aren’t a group of crashers more than any other group, they are just a large amount of people on bikes.
So I don’t know that anything has actually changed with our better bikes. That doesn’t make sense, they are much safer performing. Maybe what has changed is it has just increased the speeds we have accidents at?
But gravel on the road while banked over will slide a modern tyre out as quickly as a 20yr old one. Can you change line at a faster pace
I would say that braking practise on all surfaces teaches you a lot of transferable skills when it comes to sensing traction limits.